immortal creature that perfect service which, he was capable of rendering by creation, but which now he is unable to render because of subsequent apostasy.  For, God cannot adjust His demands to the alterations which sinful man makes in himself.  This would be to annihilate all demands and obligations.  A sliding-scale would be introduced, by this method, that would reduce human duty by degrees to a minimum, where it would disappear.  For, the more sinful a creature becomes, the less inclined, and consequently the less able does he become to obey the law of God.  If, now, the Eternal Judge shapes His requisitions in accordance with the shifting character of His creature, and lowers His law down just as fast as the sinner enslaves himself to lust and sin, it is plain that sooner or later all moral obligation will run out; and whenever the creature becomes totally enslaved to self and flesh, there will no longer be any claims resting upon him.  But this cannot be so.  “For the kingdom of heaven,”—­says our Lord,—­“is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants and delivered unto them his goods.  And unto one he gave five talents, and to another two, and to another one; and straightway took his journey.”  When the settlement was made.  Each and every one of the parties was righteously summoned to account for all that had originally been intrusted to him, and to show a faithful improvement of the same.  If any one of the servants had been found to have “lacked” a part, or the whole, of the original treasure, because he had culpably lost it, think you that the fact that it was now gone from his possession, and was past recovery, would have been accepted as a valid excuse from the original obligations imposed upon him?  In like manner, the fact, that man cannot reinstate himself in his original condition of holiness and blessedness, from which he has fallen by apostasy, will not suffice to justify him before God for being in a helpless state of sin and misery, or to give him any claims upon God for deliverance from it.  God can and does pity him, in his ruined and lost estate, and if the creature will cast himself upon His mercy, acknowledging the righteousness of the entire claims of God upon him for a sinless perfection and a perfect service, he will meet and find mercy.  But if he takes the ground that he does not owe such an immense debt as this, and that God has no right to demand from him, in his apostate and helpless condition, the same perfection of character and obedience which holy Adam possessed and rendered, and which the unfallen angels possess and render, God will leave him to the workings of conscience, and the operations of stark unmitigated law and justice.  “The kingdom of heaven,”—­says our Lord,—­“is likened unto a certain king which would take account of his servants.  And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him which owed him ten thousand talents; but forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be